Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (born 1949) is a Bolivian feminist, sociologist, historian, and subaltern theorist. She is emeritus Professor at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz, Bolivia, where she taught Sociology for over thirty years. She draws upon anarchist theory as well as Quechua and Aymara cosmologies. She is a former director and longtime member of the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (Workshop on Andean Oral History). The Taller de Historia Oral Andina has conducted an ongoing critique of Western epistemologies through writings and activism for nearly two decades. She is also an activist who works directly with indigenous movements in Bolivia, such as the Katarista movement and the coca growers movement.

Some of her best-known works include Oppressed But Not Defeated: Peasant Struggles Among the Aymara and Quechua in Bolivia, 1900–1980 (Geneva: UNRISD, 1984), Ch'ixinakax Utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization and The politics and ideology of the Colombian peasant movement: the case of ANUC (National Association of Peasant Smallholders).

There is a street named after her in Coquimbo, Chile. It is next to streets named after Emma Goldman, Teresa Montt and Rosa Luxemburg.

Education Cusicanqui earned a degree in sociology from the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in 1976 and a master's degree in Social Sciences from Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in 1979.